Books

How capable are we to profoundly change our behavior and way of thinking? And are we ready to pay the price? In her new novel, internationally renowned Karin Alvtegen gives an intriguing close-up view of human beings, caught in their own thinking and acting while constantly struggling to fit in.

Peter Brolin is sitting by himself in Nyléns café. Heavily in debt, unable to improve his situation and waiting for another fit of angst. Suddenly the door opens and a woman unknown to him walks up to his table. Obviously she mistakes him for someone else, and Peter is, due to his present state of periodical panic attack unable to protest. She disappears and leaves a parcel behind – for 1000 Swedish kronor, he is to deliver it to her husband. The parcel and the frightening content drags Peter into a nightmare, in search for this insane, obsessed woman – a pursuit in which he is eventually forced to confront the shadows of his own past.

Sibylla Forsenström doesn’t exist. For fifteen years, she has been excluded from society. As one of the homeless in Stockholm, she takes each day as it comes and has all her possessions in her rucksack. To find food for the day and somewhere to sleep for the night demands all her time and effort. But it does not help her in keeping the thoughts away from the past – from the questions about why her life has turned out the way it did. Then a catastrophe happens. One night, she is in the wrong place at the wrong time. A man is brutally murdered and too many circumstances lead to Sibylla as being the murderer. For fifteen years nobody has asked for her, but suddenly she is the most wanted person in Sweden. She knows how to survive, but now she has to flee…

Eva and Henrik have been living together for fifteen years and have a son together. Eva suddenly realizes that her husband is seeing another woman. In anger and desperation, she decides to seek revenge. At the same time, a young man has for the past two years been watching by a hospital bed where his girlfriend lies in a coma after an accident. But his year-ning for closeness is growing excruciating. She keeps letting him down by refusing to wake up. Deceit deals with how devastating it can be to be let down and how our destructive actions create consequences far beyond our control. The destiny of Jonas and Eva is the consequence of other people’s actions and it is by chance that the roads of these two people cross...

An existential thriller about the power of fear and the brains capability to repress things that is to painful to remember. About the fatal consequences when a girl brought up in a rigorous religious home is forced to deny her sexuality. And about the biggest shame of all: The feeling of not having been loved by one’s parents.

How much is glory and fame really worth, when counted in the suffering of the people closest to you? The death of the housekeeper of the fictive world-famous Nobel Prize laureate Axel Ragnerfeldt becomes the starting point of an investigation into the claustrophobic family ties, mysterious disappearances and dark secrets surrounding a man shrouded in myth. With her fifth novel Shadow, Karin Alvtegen has achieved her darkest and most complex thriller to date, in which the disturbing truth of a sick family is gradually and mercilessly laid bare.